Random comments on interesting posts within the agile software development community...

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Agile is not a metric, it's a journey...

As ridiculously fluffy as that sounds, it is true! You can't measure your team's agility and say, "Yup, we are there!". It is a mindset. All of the agile approaches (XP, Scrum, Lean, etc) are simply schools of thought.

... Then he added that if you are not doing pair-programming or continuous integration, how can you say that you are agile. There I got the idea that what he was confused at.

Sometimes it is hard for people to differentiate and digest the differences between the Agile practices and many of the XP practices. They somehow get mislead by the idea that the XP practices etc are part of Agile. And Agile enforces these practices with it.

Many interesting comments are starting to come in, but mine was this:

I’ve dealt with this myself. I try to explain that the manifesto was the result of many people with different ideas on how to solve the same problem. The manifesto is the solution to the problem strategically. The “denominations” of agile are tactical approaches to solving the problem. Scrum is product and schedule focused, XP is engineering focused. And oh yeah, many of them have converged over the years.

Contrasting XP/Scrum with Kanban, Crystal, Lean, etc also tends to help. When people can see the common outcomes from the different approaches, it starts defining Agile by the results and not the chosen methods.